Anthony Albanese's waiting game

Anthony Albanese was - and still is - the people's choice for Labor leader. Could the knockabout MP with a boutique beer named after him one day be PM?

By Jane Cadzow

27 August 2015 — 4:24pm

Five days after Labor's thumping defeat in the 2013 federal election, Anthony Albanese went to Canberra for a meeting with his demoralised parliamentary colleagues. The man seen by some as the conscience of the party had decided to stand for its leadership, but when he got off the plane in the national capital, he found himself having second thoughts. He felt flat and tired. Was he really the right person to restore Labor's fortunes? "There was self-doubt," he says.

Which, to Albanese, seemed problematic in itself. Self-doubt was not a quality he associated with leaders. Having been a cabinet minister in the governments of both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Labor's last two prime ministers, he knew that if they had one thing in common, it was an unswerving belief that they were tailor-made for the top job. Bill Shorten, who had already declared himself a leadership candidate, evidently had that same sense of destiny. Friends of Shorten's reported that his sights had been fixed firmly on The Lodge since he was at university.

Anthony Albanese wearing his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league jersey in Marrickville, part of his inner-west Sydney electorate of Grayndler.

Photo: Nic Walker

But Albanese? "You won't find anyone who says that I said to them, 'I might be leader one day.' Let alone, 'I will be leader one day,' " he says. "When I was at uni, I thought if I could have been on Sydney City Council, that would be high political office." As he agonised over whether to run against Shorten, he wondered whether his personality type ruled him out of contention – "because I don't have the 'destiny' thing".

At Canberra airport, Albanese climbed into a Commonwealth car for the final leg of his journey to Parliament House. On the way, he took a call from Tom Uren, former federal minister and revered elder statesman of the Labor movement. Uren was not just a mentor but a father figure to Albanese, who vividly remembers their conversation. "Tom said, 'So, are you running?' I said, 'Oh, look.' He said, 'What's the problem?' I said, 'I'm not sure I want to do this. I'm not sure I want to be the leader of the Labor Party, basically.' "

Uren made clear to Albanese that it was not the time for soul-searching. "He said, 'You have a responsibility, comrade. You're ready. You're the best candidate. It's the right thing to do. And they're crazy if they don't vote for you.' "

The ensuing contest between Albanese and Shorten was the first in Labor's history in which ordinary party members had a say in the choice of federal leader. Albanese comfortably won the popular ballot, attracting 60 per cent of the more than 30,000 votes cast. But equal weight was given to the ballot of the 86 members of Caucus – that is, Labor's federal parliamentarians – and Shorten won 64 per cent of those votes, thereby becoming Opposition leader. "I think my concession speech was really bloody good," Albanese says. "I was positive towards Bill. I gave him absolutely clear air."

I ask how Uren, who died aged 93 earlier this year, had reacted to the result. "Oh, he was angry," Albanese replies with a laugh. "He was angry."

The national affairs editor of The Age, Tony Wright, once observed that Albanese wore his clothes with "all the panache of a union organiser from the 1950s". When I meet the 52-year-old federal member for Grayndler at his electorate office in inner-western Sydney, I see what Wright meant. There is nothing wrong with the navy suit. It's just that, even after all these years on the national stage – he entered federal parliament in 1996 – Albanese is one of those men who seem slightly ill at ease in a collar and tie. To look at him is to know that he has played a lot of pool in tile-walled pubs and that his natural attire is a rugby league supporter's jersey. His face is round, his hair is thinning, his manner is cheery and direct. "Journalist," he says, alerting his staff to my arrival. "So no f...ing swearing."

Labor has been in an election-winning position in opinion polls since almost immediately after Tony Abbott's Liberal-National coalition government took office. But that seems to be due more to the Coalition's unpopularity than to anything Bill Shorten has done. A Fairfax-Ipsos poll two weeks ago indicated that only four in 10 voters approved of the way Shorten was handling his job. Earlier this month, when respondents in a ReachTEL poll were asked who they would most like to see as Labor leader, just 25 per cent nominated Shorten. The winner was Albanese, with 40 per cent of the vote. (Deputy leader Tanya Plibersek came second, with 35 per cent.)

To his friend Paul Murphy, chief executive of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the esteem in which Albanese is held seems, if anything, to be on the rise. "I've noticed lately that when you go anywhere with Anthony, there are people wanting to take pictures with him all the time," says Murphy. The other thing that happens?

Albanese with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in Parliament House in May.

Photo: Andrew Meares

"People yell out, 'Albo!', " admits Albanese, who has had the nickname since boyhood but is still growing accustomed to hearing it hollered in the street. The whole world calls him Albo these days, he says, sounding half-bemused, half-chuffed. "I introduce myself to people as Anthony and they go, 'Yes, Albo.' " (When I mention to acquaintances that I am writing about Albanese, this is how they respond: "Albo!")

Former Labor MP Maxine McKew isn't surprised that Albanese won the rank-and-file vote in the leadership contest. "I think the Labor membership sees Albo as a very authentic figure," she says. "Authentically Labor. They like the grit; the rough-diamond stuff." That lack of polish appeals to people right across the political spectrum, contends Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie. At a time when politicians are widely perceived as being all spin and self-interest, "it's refreshing to see someone like Albo who still stands for something," Wilkie says. "He's a good, old-fashioned leftie. He speaks from the heart. And he fights for what he believes."

With Tebbutt in June this year, attending the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House.

Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

He understands what it's like to be poor. There aren't many in the modern Labor Party who've ever experienced it.

Albanese tells me his single mother brought him up to have three great faiths – "the Catholic church, the South Sydney football club and Labor". He no longer goes to mass, but has remained fiercely loyal to the Rabbitohs (he played a significant role in the campaign to rescue the club after it was dropped from the NRL premiership competition in 1999). And his political allegiance has never wavered. "I don't have just an intellectual attachment to the Labor Party," he says. "It's part of who I am."

The first person in his immediate family to finish school to year 12, Albanese is regarded as one of Labor's smartest tacticians and most rousing debaters. "Our best parliamentary performer," says former Labor defence minister, Stephen Smith, who has become aware since returning to civilian life of the breadth of Albanese's appeal: "People say to me, 'I saw you with Albo. He's a good bloke.' Everyone likes Albo."

Albanese with Labor elder statesman and mentor Tom Uren in 2010.

Photo: Simon Alekna

On the floor of the House of Representatives, Albanese uses humour to withering effect. Prime Minister Abbott is a favourite target ("In your guts, you know he's nuts") but no one on the conservative benches is safe. Says McKew: "He is a hardened political warrior. He plays the game as tough as anybody."

So people took notice when Albanese fought back tears at a media conference in early 2012. It was 20 months after factional leaders including Bill Shorten had ambushed Kevin Rudd, replacing the first-term Labor prime minister with his deputy, Julia Gillard. Rudd was mounting a challenge against his former deputy, trying to get his job back, and Albanese – who had opposed Rudd's ousting – announced that he would support him. Rudd had been treated unfairly, he told the assembled reporters. And the subsequent sniping between the Rudd and Gillard camps was tearing Labor apart. Struggling to express his despair and frustration, Albanese said: "I like fighting Tories. That's what I do."

The "hot" Albanese in 1989.

So simple and heartfelt was the message, and so strongly did it resonate with Labor voters, that T-shirts soon appeared with the words emblazoned across the front. These are still manufactured, and quickly sold out at a Labor fundraiser in Melbourne in May. (Also moving briskly were T-shirts printed with a flattering picture of a much younger Albanese – the so-called "Hot Albo" photo, above right – which went viral on social media a couple of years ago.) Albanese, who was DJ for the evening, played tracks by a selection of his favourite bands, from the Pixies and the Killers to the Celibate Rifles. That event was such a hit that he pulled on his black bomber jacket again last month, reprising his DJ role at the Newtown Social Club in Sydney. This time, the queue for entry stretched down the street. "We don't know how many people tried to get in," Albanese says, "but somewhere between 600 and 800." He pauses. "To listen to me play stuff I like on a Friday night. It's an odd world."

In mid-July, Albanese attended the launch of "Albo" beer, produced by a microbrewery in his electorate. "The people's choice!" said brewer Pat McInerney, raising his glass. A few weeks later, McInerney tells me that he is struggling to make enough of the pale corn ale to keep up with demand. "We thought it would stay local," he says, "but no, it's gone berserk actually. We've had inquiries from all over Australia." Call it the Albo effect. "He's quite the cult figure."

Anthony Albanese at the Henson Park Hotel in Marrickville.

Photo: Nic Walker

For Albanese, the political is always personal. As infrastructure and transport minister under Rudd and Gillard, he committed a huge sum – $7.6 billion – to upgrading the Pacific Highway, which links Sydney and Brisbane. "To me, it was the most important road safety project in Australia," he says. And to his family, the death toll on the notoriously dangerous route was more than a statistic: before he was born, his cousin, Anthony Howett, had been killed in an accident on the highway.

"I was named after him," says Albanese, who grew up in public housing in Camperdown, in Sydney's inner west. His mother, Maryanne, had met his Italian father, Carlo Albanese, while travelling in Europe in her mid-20s. Anthony never knew Carlo, but in an era when births outside marriage were referred to as "illegitimate", Maryanne adopted his surname for herself and her son. The modest townhouse in which she raised Anthony, first occupied by her own parents, was Maryanne's home for her entire life.

Albanese's long-time partner is the recently retired Labor NSW state parliamentarian and former deputy premier, Carmel Tebbutt. They married in 2000, and have a 14-year-old son, Nathan. "I've got a wonderful wife, who's much too good for me," Albanese says. But Maryanne is the woman he credits with having done most to shape him. "She just loved him so much," says Paul Murphy. "And he loved her so much. They were a really, really tight unit."

Maryanne suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis, which hospitalised her for long stretches. From the age of 12, Albanese, her only child, spent weeks at a time living on his own. When his mother was home, he acted as her carer. By the time he started studying economics at Sydney University, Maryanne's joints were so swollen and her fingers so misshapen that he had to cut up her food for her.

A university friend who came to dinner described the situation to his own mother, who worked for an orthopaedic surgeon. The specialist agreed to see Maryanne. "And that changed my mum's life," Albanese says. "He operated. Reconstructed her feet, so she could walk properly, and her hands, so that she could use them. It took a few years, the whole exercise. But it made an enormous difference to her."

Former Labor senator Graham Richardson says of Albanese: "He understands what it's like to be poor. There aren't many in the modern Labor Party who've ever experienced it." Albanese insists that at no stage during his childhood did he think of himself as deprived. Maryanne managed her pension so carefully that she paid bills before they were due and never fell behind with her rent. He worked as a paper-boy for extra income. "We didn't have anything, but we didn't want for anything, either," he says.

Still, Albanese has always seen himself as an advocate for the disadvantaged. A leader of Labor's Left faction, he was furious to learn just before the 2012 federal budget that prime minister Gillard had decided to move single mothers and fathers off parenting payments when their children turned eight, and onto the lower Newstart allowance for job seekers.

At a fiery Cabinet meeting, he said he could not support such a measure. Last month, at Labor's national conference, Albanese fought unsuccessfully against Bill Shorten's push to give future Labor governments permission to turn back asylum seekers' boats. Albanese said he personally couldn't send a vessel full of desperate people back to sea, so could not endorse a policy that asked others to do it.

"He will always have a solid countervailing opinion when one's needed," says Bruce Hawker, a political strategist and the chairman of Campaigns and Communications Group. "If the party looks like it's steering off course, you can be sure that Albo will be tying himself to the wheel, trying to bring it back on course."

The Right faction usually has the numbers but Albanese is skilled at back-room bargaining. Also, he is prepared to make compromises. "I think he walks that line between idealist and pragmatic politician," Hawker says. "Which is exactly what Tom Uren did."

Graham Richardson's former role as a power-broker for the party's Right faction often put him on the opposite side of the negotiating table from Albanese. "In all my dealings with him, never once did he rat on a deal," Richardson says. "You know when you shake hands with Anthony that the deal will stick, even if it's uncomfortable for him to keep it."

Apart from that, Richardson has always enjoyed his company: "I grew up in the Labor party with a Left completely devoid of humour. Then along comes a bloke with warmth and a heart and a very keen wit."

Meredith Burgmann, former Labor president of the NSW Legislative Council, puts it this way: "You're glad when he arrives at a party: 'It'll be fun now.' " But it is the principled, plain-speaking aspect of Albanese's character that Burgmann appreciates most. "He never gives you the feeling that he's 'managing' his persona," she says. "He's a politician of conviction, which is what people are crying out for." Well, not all people. "He's made terrible enemies along the way."

Of the 86 Labor MPs and senators who voted in the leadership contest, 47 were members of Shorten's Right faction, 36 were members of Albanese's Left faction, and three were non-aligned. If all 36 from the Left had voted for Albanese, he would have won 41 per cent of the Caucus ballot – which would have been enough, when combined with his 60 per cent of the general membership's vote, to see him elected opposition leader. But he got only 31 votes.

"If I was one of those left-wingers who hadn't voted for him in the leadership ballot in the Caucus, I would be watching my back," says federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne, who appears weekly with Albanese on Nine's Today show. "Actually, I wouldn't have to watch my back, because Anthony would come from the front. But I'd be protecting my weak spots."

Within Labor, crossing Albanese has long been regarded as risky. For all his humanity, there is something steely underneath ("I'd never want to fall foul of him," says Maxine McKew), and as a faction leader, he has influence over the allocation of such prizes as jobs on Labor's front bench.

He tells me he has no hard feelings about the ballot: "There are probably people who think I'm upset with them. I'm not." Yet two members of the Left reported to have voted against him – former ministers Warren Snowdon and Kate Lundy – were subsequently left out of the opposition shadow ministry.

My attempts to speak to those on the Left who supported Shorten are unsuccessful: they don't return my calls. Albanese helpfully suggests that if I'm looking for negative comment about him, I should contact his old adversary Martin Ferguson, the former Labor resources minister who now works as a lobbyist for the oil and gas industries: "He'll tell you what a f...ing arsehole I am." I leave a message for Ferguson, but he doesn't call back, either.

Albanese doubts he had met a Liberal voter until he got to university. In his neighbourhood, he says, attending meetings of the Camperdown branch of the Labor Party was "just one of the things you did: church on Sunday, bingo on Monday, branch on Tuesday." He joined the party at 15, and by 22 was Young Labor's NSW president. "He was a very effective and capable activist – a standout," says Labor luminary John Faulkner.

After working as a research officer for Uren, who later wrote of developing "a kind of fatherly love for him", Albanese was elected assistant secretary of Labor's NSW branch in 1989, at the age of 26. It was a time of open warfare between the party's Left and the Right, he says, "and I was the only left-winger in an office of 20 people". He returned from a study tour to the US to find his office had been shifted to a glass-walled enclosure in the middle of the floor, where his colleagues could keep an eye on him. He and a team of friends dismantled the renovations. "I wasn't going to be pushed around by anyone."

Elected to federal parliament on his 33rd birthday, Albanese said in his maiden speech that his mother had instilled in him a strong commitment to social justice. "I would like to see all of Australia's wealthiest individuals and companies pay their fair share of taxation," he said. At Maryanne's funeral six years later, in 2002, he remembered how proudly she had watched from the gallery: "The glow from her smile lit up the House of Representatives."

If only Maryanne had been around to see Albanese call the shots in the chamber during Labor's two terms in office from 2007. As leader of the house, essentially the government's chief parliamentary strategist, he played a particularly critical role during the three years of the Gillard-led minority government.

Many had predicted its early collapse, says independent MP Andrew Wilkie, "but it proved to be very stable and very reformist. And that stability was due to Albo more than anyone else. He was masterful at holding the hung parliament together. From day one, he established a good working relationship with every cross-bencher."

One of those cross-benchers, former NSW independent Tony Windsor, says he admired Albanese's willingness to put aside his personal feelings in the interests of getting things done: "He was clearly a Rudd man, but no one worked harder for Gillard."

When Rudd finally got back the prime ministership in June 2013, three months before the election everyone knew Labor would lose, he asked Albanese to be his deputy. For the three-time winner of the Australian Parliament Snooker Championship, it was a thrilling addition to the CV. "I was deputy prime minister!" Albanese says, still incredulous. And more excitement was to come. Last October, Souths won the rugby league grand final for the first time in 43 years. Albanese and his mother had been in the crowd to see the 1971 victory. He and his son were at the 2014 match. Nathan barracked wildly. "I cried a lot," Albanese says.

His present title is opposition spokesman for infrastructure, transport, cities and tourism. One thing Albanese likes about not being in government is that he gets to spend more time in his electorate: he has always adored grassroots politics.

One evening, I go along to a community meeting he has called to discuss the Coalition's proposed changes to higher education. Fewer than 40 people turn up – it is one of the coldest nights of the year – but Albanese radiates interest and enthusiasm, listening intently to everything that is said. Before vacating the freezing hall, he and his staff stack a couple of hundred plastic chairs. "That was terrific!" he says, as he heads to his car.

A former NSW Labor parliamentarian tells me she understands why the younger Albanese didn't see himself as having the makings of a party leader. "He would have said he wasn't good-looking enough, or tall enough, didn't have the gravitas," she says. In her opinion, this has been an advantage to him. "In many ways, he's been freer to be himself. Freer to be honest. Freer not to worry too much about whether his tie is straight or his suit is beautiful. That's a very big plus, both in terms of public image and also, probably, in terms of living with yourself."

In fact, Albanese admits to having embarked on a little self-improvement: braces and dental implants have fixed his "terrible working-class teeth". Discussing the Labor leadership, I say in passing that I know he has declared himself unavailable. "I haven't said that," he corrects me. "What I've said is, Bill Shorten will lead us to the election." He adds: "I think the Labor Party has learned a lesson about destabilisation of leaders, and where that leads. So everyone is working with a common interest."

I remind him that during the leadership contest, he said he believed he was best-placed to beat the Coalition. "I ran because I thought I was the best candidate for the Labor Party," he agrees. And yes, he knows some still hold that view. "Someone put something up the other day saying, 'I support Albo MP being leader because he's the one they fear.' "

Christopher Pyne says of Albanese: "I think he's still campaigning for the leadership. He's busily softening his image with all this DJing and that kind of caper." Rules introduced by Rudd make it difficult for a federal Labor leader to be challenged between elections, but as Meredith Burgmann points out, it's anyone guess what the future holds. Will Albo MP ever be Albo PM? "I've still got my fingers crossed," Burgmann says.